


Scent Memory

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-06
Updated: 2011-12-06
Packaged: 2017-10-27 00:06:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/289373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>my contribution to Wank Week for the Tumblr DA fandom. . .</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scent Memory

When she’s been deposited in the house, safe and laden with packages, Leandra watches her son and the healer duck back out into the street.  They wave, and she sees them tease their palms together, secretly, behind the swirl of robe and cloak.  As if in prayer.  As if the world were theirs to make.  And it is, she supposes, no different from the way she had seen it when she was their age.

 _You think you invented it.  Please!  I can tell you that your father and I. . ._

 _Mother!_

Her children flush so prettily, and she smiles at the memory that could have been Garrett this very afternoon in the shop, or Bethany at sixteen hiding her face under the covers.  Mothers don’t do that.

“But we do,” she murmurs to the quiet house.  And thank the Maker for _that._

She pulls the scarf from her throat, climbs the stairs, and her smile broadens.  Malcolm wouldn’t have let it go until his sons were apoplectic with disgust.  He was wicked in that way, and more than a little creative.  If her boys only knew how far their father had been willing to go for a few, heated moments . . .while backs were turned and candles snuffed.

Inside her room, Leandra pauses.  Her laundry is there, folded with clean lines and stacked on the bed . . .Orana’s tucked a sachet of sage and lavender between her pillows.  It’s new, and unexpectedly powerful for such a small thing.  Sage and lavender grow in the courtyard.  It’s a scent so entwined with the house, and its history, that she closes her eyes and just _breathes_.  Packages slip from her fingers and, as simple as that, she’s lost in the phantom smell of him.

Before she knows how to feel insecure about the door, or the time of day, Leandra surrenders to the bed, stretching out with a sigh.  She presses her nose to the laundry, pulling it close like soft shoulders.

 _The tall windows in the corridor are open.  From inside the linen closet, Leandra can hear voices bounce against stone.  Her father and Gamlen, arguing in the courtyard.  She’s about to huff and go back to the business of dragging out the winter blankets when a shadow fills the narrow doorway._

Turning in her dress, swimming on the bed with the sachet teasing her cheek and the laundry under her arms, she bunches her skirts and finds her thighs.

“Oh, Mal. No!” Her closed eyes mean that he can stand there in her memory forever.  Though she’s older, and writhing on a bed they’ve never shared, she is also younger . . .and terrified that his brashness will be the end of everything.

 _His smile is a slash of white while the rest of him remains a hulking shadow, and he brings his mouth to her like a torch in the cramped closet, silencing her surprise with grinning kisses and quick hands.  There are birds chirruping in the yard.  And it’s the perfect thing, the greatest accompaniment, as the heavy wool coverlet droops from her hands and is replaced with Malcolm’s shoulders.  Because she can’t speak, because noise is only for the truly free, she bends her voice inward and watches the bright shafts of light slanting beyond the door while he kneels in front of her, urging her legs apart._

The thin soles of her shoes don’t grip the bed like they should, but Leandra finds purchase where it counts.  She finds it in the drag of her own fingernails through her folds, in the teasing swirl, and in the sweat gathered between her breasts.  There is so much to hold onto, so the memory doesn’t slip and neither does she. 

 _The wall is too far back to lean against, and Malcolm is buried to his nose between her thighs, holding her, strumming with his tongue and his coarse fingers until she wants to sing along.  So Leandra grips the shelves on either side of her, cursing the open windows in the corridor.  At the same time, though, she blesses the scent of sage and lavender, panting into the stiff stack of sheets, knuckles white on the wood.  The birds whistle, and Gamlen coughs outside the window, and Malcolm puts his fingers inside her.  Her body is so quick for him, and she knows he’ll lament that it has to be this way, always cloaked in darkness and never an ounce of languorous nakedness in the sun, but it matters so little when he pulls her clit between his teeth and feathers it with his tongue.  And every scarlet thread that jerks through her, every helpless groan he diverts to the task of her pleasure, reminds her that this man_ is _the sun and stars now.  That the essence of light is the point, the very edge, at which it counters the dark._

Her habit is to bite back her groans.  Even in Lothering, when the wolves seemed reasonably far from their door, Leandra’s gasps were quiet.  And Malcolm would always have to compel her voice with his own.  After a while, she ceased blushing at the way he grunted and exploded and spouted profanity.  After a while, she learned to join the chorus, and make him proud of her tongue and her throat as they worked the language of joy. 

In the stillness of the Amell home, with the afternoon heat sagging through the windows, Leandra is beyond caring about the consequence of her voice.  She draws the pads of her fingers up and up, pressing when the pangs shoot through her, and willing her body to hold onto them like precious little fireflies.  Though they protest the way she spreads her knees too wide, her hips rally, gather momentum, and surge to meet the downstroke of her fingers.

 _When she reaches her silent climax, Leandra holds herself rigid, with her nose pressed into the comfort of linen and sage.  She lets him coax her down, gather her into his lap.  She’s not a knee-buckler, never has been, but Malcolm wants her arms around his neck and her hair under his nose.  So, they lock themselves together on the floor of the closet, like too-new pieces of a puzzle, tight and loathe to separate.  Two sets of splayed knees, wobbly thighs and damp smalls.  They kiss, and she knows she will taste like lavender wrapped in copper wire, electric and floral.  What she sucks from his lips is sharp and heady, and unmistakably_ her _.  Malcolm peppers her face with kisses, the bare beginnings of a beard teasing her forehead and the curve of her nose.  The voices in the courtyard grow loud, and the sound of upset feathers means the birds have gone.  He pushes her fingers away from his groin, his mind already ten steps down the hall, slipping through the last window over the gatehouse roof.  She takes his face between her hands.  There are so many rotted tears that they’ve blocked themselves now, and refuse to flow.  Too many tears for what they never get to finish, and for the way she forces herself to watch him leave.  It seems like a heartbeat or two and she’s alone, and the closet is once again just a closet.  It bears down on Leandra with its sage-scented shadows as deep as the voice of her father in the foyer, or the woolen blankets she hugs to her chest._

The truest thing, though, isn’t the pain of those endings, or the tears that squeeze past her lashes and find a path through the crinkles around her eyes.  The truth he would have her remember is in the way Leandra arches off the bed, spun–out to completion with her first two fingers grinding away.  And Malcolm’s name decorating her lips.  She makes him proud, in her mind, with the fullness of her voice. . . and it echoes in the room, over the sun-bleached wallpaper and through the open window, with enough strength to startle the pigeons on the ledge outside.

She tosses her skirt down with a flick, and lets her weary knees fall to the side.  Within her chest, the crash of blood stutters and slows.  The laundry, once a splendidly neat pile of things, is now a mess under her shoulders.  She turns on her side, gathering cloth and lace under her cheek, and marries the sachet and the lingering tang of her fingers with the rasp of her whisper.

“Love, I _miss_ you.”


End file.
